Visits to music piracy websites went up more than 13 percent last year, a new report says. The majority of those visits were to sites that allow users to download the audio from YouTube URLs.
Visits to music piracy websites went up more than 13 percent last year, a new report says. The majority of those visits were to sites that allow users to download the audio from YouTube URLs.
Songs and albums that I’ve listened to for years have disappeared from my Apple Music subscription. I swapped completely to a paid service and never looked back until they removed things I could listen to last month.
It may have been user error, for me. I’m pretty sure CDs I had bought and ripped to ITunes changed to ‘this song is not on your device’ cloud copies when Apple Music happened- then they disappeared entirely, even though they were files I added to OG iTunes almost 20 years ago.
Sadly, my iPod’s hard drive failed a while ago. I enjoyed the free streaming stuff for the few and fewer times I had music on. I’ll be upgrading the iPod and heading out to sea… again.
Songs and albums that I’ve uploaded from my own collection have disappeared from Apple Music, despite my physically owning them on CD and Apple advertising the ability to store my CD rips in the cloud.
It’s unacceptable. I’m still on Apple Music for now, but moving my music library to Jellyfin looks more appealing by the day.
Does somebody know a good torrent music streaming app? Something like spotify but with data from musicbrainz or anything like that and the files from torrents.
If that was adequate to explain Youtube’s decision-making, the platform would be unrecognizably different for all of the terrible things Youtube didn’t do because it would be – and indeed was – terrible
It is infringement if you’re sharing the files, but if you make a copy for yourself, then it’s considered fair use. See: Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc.
Internet isn’t always available, such as in an airplane or someone might not want to give access to the Internet to their child but wants to give them video or audio on a tablet. They can legally copy the content and watch it later.
There are legal issues with software that is solely designed to bypass drm, but that only applies to the software creator, not the user.
That’s my point though. YouTube’s audio quality is utter wank, so it’s easier to source the music through the likes of Spotify and rip it for piracy. All you need to do at that point is tamper with the watermarking. If you’re pulling the OGG Vorbis source files directly, and have access to two Premium accounts, you can rip it twice and diff it to see the areas that need to be modified
I’m pretty current on technology but honestly never heard of Youtube-To-MP3 conversion.
Thinking this may be the ticket to cutting the cord with Spotify, but as others have suggested, I fully intend to buy tracks of my favorite indie folks too.
Do artists actually get a decent cut from Band Camp?
If you’re on linux use yt-dlp, it’s the tits, works on bandcamp too. If you’re on windows - they may have a win version, idk, check though because it rules.
Bandcamp was recently sold as far as I’m aware. Also, after a recent purchase I made from them I had my credit card frauded. Can’t say with 100% assurance that it was because of something going on with bandcamp, but it’s my belief it was them. Something seems off from before, so I’ve decided to take a break from buying anything from them for a while.
I used to do lots of piracy back in the days. I am so glad those days are behind me and have not been big on the scene. What would be some sites to avoid to not fall in the trap of being a criminal. I love giving companies all of my money and do not ever want to go back to my old ways. Please help me with a nice list of things to avoid.
haven’t looked into protonvpn much, but it’s more or less a different company providing the same service. I imagine the differences aren’t too significant if you trust both companies
You totally don’t want to just learn Linux command line and how to use the youtube-dl/yt-dlp packages through WSL or a Linux distro, that would deny corporations all of your money and be way too convenient. Thankfully it’s not intuitive to learn or there would be so much more piracy!
Yt-dlp is also available on Windows. No reason to spin up wsl or a Linux distro. There are also plenty of yt-dlp apps with GUI for those who don’t want to use a terminal.
Plex’s specialty audio client Plexamp is pretty good if you want to make your own “radio stations.” And if you have a Plex Pass, the server does “sonic analysis” of each track so it can do a good job of playing related music in its smart playlists.
Of course, Plex Pass ain’t free, but if you are in it for the long haul the lifetime purchase may be worth it.
(Everyone’s worried about Plex’s future right now but I would be surprised if they killed self-hosting. That’s another topic though.)
I know this does not make me look good - but I am a YouTube Premium subscriber. I had Spotify, but they jacked up their family plan rate, and it was only a few bucks cheaper than Premium, then I got the ad-free (without adblockers). I mostly did it to help my kids avoid the toxic ads that are littered into the kid content. The main reason I stick with some of this stuff is for the discovery. Pandora was great, Spotify is ok.
Regardless - the smart playlists, and AI stuff on YouTube music is AWFUL. I cannot put into words how bad it is. Spotify got it right about 1/4-1/2 of the time. YouTube, maybe 1/100. Constantly recommending a country, which I cannot stand. When it isn’t doing country, it recommends hard rock/metal which I also do not listen to. I feel like I need a new way to find music, then I could sever ties with all these trashy subscriptions.
I have yt premium for the same reason. Toddlers have little patience for ads on their Kindle fire, and they get upset when they click one to buy a luxury watch and can’t figure out how to get back to cocomelon.
I actually like the service and feel it’s fairly priced. So I don’t mind paying for it. I stream yt music all day at work.
I have started buying vinyl with the digital downloads when I find a great album. I feel better doing it this way. Most of my music is not super big name artists.
I don’t pay for anything YouTube-related but not at all surprised they recommend shit that is irrelevant.
I’m the opposite as you and enjoy metal/rock as well as rap/hip hop. But I am constantly being shown “recommendations” for pop and anything I’ve literally never listened to. Also tons of live performances I just don’t care about.
And what’s funny is there is a way to tell YouTube that you don’t want to see certain videos of non-music stuff, like if I don’t want to see anything from LTT when it’s recommended. But for music? Lol, nope. No such option. It’s so stupid…
That surprises me, but I suppose it had to work for some listeners or they wouldn’t have gotten it past testing. I have even tried clearing my listen history and starting over - still comes up with country and (going to clarify) ‘metal’ . I like rock and alternative and some forms of pop, as well as a bit of hip hop. cannot fathom why it suggests what it does.
I never thumbs up or down and I find the recommended albums and “Mixed for your” playlists are pretty accurate. I hate that my grandfathered price went up last December tho
I feel you. Feels like the algorithm just does whatever now, on main YouTube and Shorts it is awful as well, constantly showing me the same 5 shorts and recommending me channels I have asked to “not recommend” multiple times. No amount of disliking and clicking “Not Interested” seems to help, at least not for longer than a day.
I dunno, sorry to hear about your experience. I’ve never had a thumb downed song come back up, not ever. And it absolutely affects what kinds of things come up in my radios.
But we’ll still need a proper place to support our favorite creators (where the artists actually receive some of the money). I wonder where people will migrate next.
Haven’t heard about that one, thank you for the heads-up.
First impressions:
From top 10 artists i follow:
5/10 have profile and uploaded at least one song on Bandcamp.
3/10 have an account on Audius (possibility to donate).
1/10 has uploaded at least one song on Audius.
One MUST upload a profile picture to create an account.
About 1/3 of proposed artists during account creation have uploaded <5 songs, most seem to be remix and cover artists.
Didn’t figure out how to search for artists during account creation, ended up choosing 2/3 artists I’ve never heard of.
Not immediately apparent whether I can download bought music to a lossless format.
Not sure how to buy album or individual song at first glance.
LOTS of remixes and covers, not so much original songs (this is both good and bad).
Nice that you can donate arbitrary amount without buying anything, in case you already got the music from… other places…
I didn’t find anyplace where “$AUDIO” is explained, how much the artist receives, or what you receive if anything.
Less relevant observations:
weird pause/play button, sometimes there’s just a loading wheel spinning where it’s supposed to be, not really functional.
Slightly intrusive, had to disable some plugins (Javascript (obviously it’s playing music) and fingerprinting (cloudflare?)) for the site to load. Not relevant to music, but just a general observation since we’re in the piracy community.
Not much going on by now, but it probably just needs some time to grow and assimilate the likely soon-to-be-migrating Bandcamp user base.
I’ll keep an eye on it, and probably revisit it once more artists have migrated to it.
Thanks for the detailed obesrvation! Yeah unfortunately it still has some technical issues and shortcomings but imo this platform has some great potential.
That could be simple to fix. I bought a used SL-1500 which had the issue that it’d only spin at 33rpm. 45rpm didn’t work. I opened it up and with some tuner spray I washed the switch (spraying it, switching it back and forth). Now as good as new.
These things are built like tanks
Oh yeah that’s way out of my wheelhouse too lol. Hopefully someone online has or posts a video on fixing it (or at least a similar table with the same issue)!
Is t it funny how this seems to be happening in every industry possible? And it’s always reported with sUcH sURpRisE!
Like, we are being abused by capitalists. It feels good to steal. Because they can’t stop taking more and more from us, squeezing us harder and harder.
When you present us with ease of use and a reasonable price point, we are happy with the trade. But they need their returns to keep growing, so they keep squeezing us harder. Their investors demand the line go up. So they squeeze us harder. They need to cut costs, so they squeeze us harder.
It never stops. So we turn to theft. Because they’ve literally left us no choice.
To be fair we’ve never had more choice, and music has almost never been more affordable. We used to buy singles for like $10+. Albums for $20+. Now there are several competing streaming services where we can listen to almost unlimited music each month for less than the cost of one album. Hell, YouTube Premium includes unlimited music steaming for free. Being an independent artist has never been easier, and you can find and pay for any music you like directly with millions of your favourite artists all over the world. The industry used to be entirely controlled by large labels. Honestly, I consider the industry far healthier than it used to be.
I pirate movies and shows because they refuse to create a Spotify-like service. Content is fragmented across a dozen services, they’re infested with ads, content quality keeps declining, the interfaces suck, and prices are outpacing inflation. I pay for Spotify because it’s still a good service for a reasonable price.
It’s a direct p2p connection to a single user for downloads. It’s not swarm style like bittorrent. It’s also a great resource for really rare / out of print stuff.
I used it without a vpn for years and never got a single nastygram from my ISP. I think I started with a beta release back around 2000 because I used to be cool like that.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
⚓ Dedicated to the discussion of digital piracy, including ethical problems and legal advancements.
Songs and albums that I’ve listened to for years have disappeared from my Apple Music subscription. I swapped completely to a paid service and never looked back until they removed things I could listen to last month.
It may have been user error, for me. I’m pretty sure CDs I had bought and ripped to ITunes changed to ‘this song is not on your device’ cloud copies when Apple Music happened- then they disappeared entirely, even though they were files I added to OG iTunes almost 20 years ago.
Sadly, my iPod’s hard drive failed a while ago. I enjoyed the free streaming stuff for the few and fewer times I had music on. I’ll be upgrading the iPod and heading out to sea… again.
Songs and albums that I’ve uploaded from my own collection have disappeared from Apple Music, despite my physically owning them on CD and Apple advertising the ability to store my CD rips in the cloud.
It’s unacceptable. I’m still on Apple Music for now, but moving my music library to Jellyfin looks more appealing by the day.
Does somebody know a good torrent music streaming app? Something like spotify but with data from musicbrainz or anything like that and the files from torrents.
Lidarr + Navidrome works flawlessly for me. Navidrome also fetches data from LastFM, such as tending songs and artist info
Jellyfin works for me
Like… Plex with plexamp? Or jellyfin with finamp?
Lidarr + Plex is the one for me
you guys use sites for that? I just use vpn + yt-dlp
Shared a news about piracy, link to paywall Wired.com. the irony
How do I pirate the article?
Like this.
Why doesn’t youtube use DRM the way other Big Tech sites do?
Because it’ll stop working on a not-insignificant portion of their userbases devices.
DRM sucks. We don’t need more of it.
If that was adequate to explain Youtube’s decision-making, the platform would be unrecognizably different for all of the terrible things Youtube didn’t do because it would be – and indeed was – terrible
google sucks too so why aren’t they using the thing that sucks?
Because YouTube isn’t the biggest ripping source. That award goes to Spotify.
Spotify rippers are rife these days. I’ve even made my own.
That isn’t piracy. It’s time shifting, and it’s perfectly legal to do it.
It is piracy if you make it available for others to download. Plus the concept of time shifting doesn’t really apply to on-demand media.
It is infringement if you’re sharing the files, but if you make a copy for yourself, then it’s considered fair use. See: Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc.
Internet isn’t always available, such as in an airplane or someone might not want to give access to the Internet to their child but wants to give them video or audio on a tablet. They can legally copy the content and watch it later.
There are legal issues with software that is solely designed to bypass drm, but that only applies to the software creator, not the user.
That’s my point though. YouTube’s audio quality is utter wank, so it’s easier to source the music through the likes of Spotify and rip it for piracy. All you need to do at that point is tamper with the watermarking. If you’re pulling the OGG Vorbis source files directly, and have access to two Premium accounts, you can rip it twice and diff it to see the areas that need to be modified
apple killing ipods and deprioritising the itunes store probably contributed to this more than anything ironically
I’m pretty current on technology but honestly never heard of Youtube-To-MP3 conversion.
Thinking this may be the ticket to cutting the cord with Spotify, but as others have suggested, I fully intend to buy tracks of my favorite indie folks too.
Do artists actually get a decent cut from Band Camp?
If you’re on linux use yt-dlp, it’s the tits, works on bandcamp too. If you’re on windows - they may have a win version, idk, check though because it rules.
Can’t answer the other question though, sorry.
Bandcamp, according to their help page, takes a 15% cut from purchases until the artist makes 5k in sales, in which case they take 10%
Bandcamp was recently sold as far as I’m aware. Also, after a recent purchase I made from them I had my credit card frauded. Can’t say with 100% assurance that it was because of something going on with bandcamp, but it’s my belief it was them. Something seems off from before, so I’ve decided to take a break from buying anything from them for a while.
They were bought by epic games recently, but I don’t think it was bandcamp that stole your card info
Ah. And you’re probably right. Just a coincidence.
I used to do lots of piracy back in the days. I am so glad those days are behind me and have not been big on the scene. What would be some sites to avoid to not fall in the trap of being a criminal. I love giving companies all of my money and do not ever want to go back to my old ways. Please help me with a nice list of things to avoid.
You want a good paid VPN first. Mullvad is amazing.
VPNs see everything you do, and you pay them for it. I don’t understand how people don’t see the irony there.
they in theory see everything someone does, but in the case of mullvad they have no idea who you are
Could you say how Mullvad differs from ProtonVPN? I have it with my mail subscription and it seems pretty good. I don’t know much about vpns though
haven’t looked into protonvpn much, but it’s more or less a different company providing the same service. I imagine the differences aren’t too significant if you trust both companies
You totally don’t want to just learn Linux command line and how to use the youtube-dl/yt-dlp packages through WSL or a Linux distro, that would deny corporations all of your money and be way too convenient. Thankfully it’s not intuitive to learn or there would be so much more piracy!
Yt-dlp is also available on Windows. No reason to spin up wsl or a Linux distro. There are also plenty of yt-dlp apps with GUI for those who don’t want to use a terminal.
Didn’t realize, good to know, thank you!
Give me lidarr but with a smart daily generated playlist focus instead of collecting artist discographies
What was the service you could upload your own. Playlist and songs and share with friends? Last.fm? Something like that, shit was awesome.
I think last.fm might still exist. I just used it for the ‘scrobbling’ — stats way before Spotify Wrapped was a thing
There’s a federated platform called Funkwhale that’s very similar to that.
https://www.funkwhale.audio/
Yeah. I want a self-hosted Pandora alternative
Plex’s specialty audio client Plexamp is pretty good if you want to make your own “radio stations.” And if you have a Plex Pass, the server does “sonic analysis” of each track so it can do a good job of playing related music in its smart playlists.
Of course, Plex Pass ain’t free, but if you are in it for the long haul the lifetime purchase may be worth it.
(Everyone’s worried about Plex’s future right now but I would be surprised if they killed self-hosting. That’s another topic though.)
I know this does not make me look good - but I am a YouTube Premium subscriber. I had Spotify, but they jacked up their family plan rate, and it was only a few bucks cheaper than Premium, then I got the ad-free (without adblockers). I mostly did it to help my kids avoid the toxic ads that are littered into the kid content. The main reason I stick with some of this stuff is for the discovery. Pandora was great, Spotify is ok.
Regardless - the smart playlists, and AI stuff on YouTube music is AWFUL. I cannot put into words how bad it is. Spotify got it right about 1/4-1/2 of the time. YouTube, maybe 1/100. Constantly recommending a country, which I cannot stand. When it isn’t doing country, it recommends hard rock/metal which I also do not listen to. I feel like I need a new way to find music, then I could sever ties with all these trashy subscriptions.
Soulseek if you don’t mind data hoarding.
I have yt premium for the same reason. Toddlers have little patience for ads on their Kindle fire, and they get upset when they click one to buy a luxury watch and can’t figure out how to get back to cocomelon.
I actually like the service and feel it’s fairly priced. So I don’t mind paying for it. I stream yt music all day at work.
I just listen to playlists that people make or youtube videos of song genres or artists that I like.
I still havent found anything can match the experience of finding music from online discussions or list hopping on RYM.
What is rym?
https://rateyourmusic.com/
Last fm users with similar taste can be a gold mine
I have started buying vinyl with the digital downloads when I find a great album. I feel better doing it this way. Most of my music is not super big name artists.
I don’t pay for anything YouTube-related but not at all surprised they recommend shit that is irrelevant.
I’m the opposite as you and enjoy metal/rock as well as rap/hip hop. But I am constantly being shown “recommendations” for pop and anything I’ve literally never listened to. Also tons of live performances I just don’t care about.
And what’s funny is there is a way to tell YouTube that you don’t want to see certain videos of non-music stuff, like if I don’t want to see anything from LTT when it’s recommended. But for music? Lol, nope. No such option. It’s so stupid…
Same boat here. My God it’s unbearable how bad YouTube premium is.
I get good value out of it…
…That being said, I curate my own feed heavily, and still have to use a ton of add-ons to keep from going insane - fuck your shorts YouTube.
It is admittedly terrible.
Not been my experience. Yt music playlists are really good for me and I’ve discovered a lot of new music through it.
That surprises me, but I suppose it had to work for some listeners or they wouldn’t have gotten it past testing. I have even tried clearing my listen history and starting over - still comes up with country and (going to clarify) ‘metal’ . I like rock and alternative and some forms of pop, as well as a bit of hip hop. cannot fathom why it suggests what it does.
Do you ever thumb down anything, or do you just skip the stuff you don’t like?
I never thumbs up or down and I find the recommended albums and “Mixed for your” playlists are pretty accurate. I hate that my grandfathered price went up last December tho
Every time. I am not sure it actually changes anything. I have submitted feedback and bug reports to YTM as well. Just generic replies.
I feel you. Feels like the algorithm just does whatever now, on main YouTube and Shorts it is awful as well, constantly showing me the same 5 shorts and recommending me channels I have asked to “not recommend” multiple times. No amount of disliking and clicking “Not Interested” seems to help, at least not for longer than a day.
I dunno, sorry to hear about your experience. I’ve never had a thumb downed song come back up, not ever. And it absolutely affects what kinds of things come up in my radios.
I wonder how hard it is to make full torrent webclient on mobile
wakes up in 2002
Your comment just made me smile. Those were the days.
The Napster has you, Neo
I never stopped but i started buying music too from small artists
I feel like Bandcamp’s biggest fans are prolific pirates with a conscience who just want to see their favorite artists actually get paid.
EDIT: Don’t forget it’s Bandcamp Friday today.
bandcamp sold out
look forward to its demise
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/oct/17/bandcamp-lays-off-half-its-staff-after-buyout-by-songtradr
The economics with the artists haven’t changed. Until they do I’ll still use them to pay artists a living wage.
But we’ll still need a proper place to support our favorite creators (where the artists actually receive some of the money). I wonder where people will migrate next.
Audius.co
Haven’t heard about that one, thank you for the heads-up.
First impressions:
Less relevant observations:
Not much going on by now, but it probably just needs some time to grow and assimilate the likely soon-to-be-migrating Bandcamp user base. I’ll keep an eye on it, and probably revisit it once more artists have migrated to it.
Thanks for the detailed obesrvation! Yeah unfortunately it still has some technical issues and shortcomings but imo this platform has some great potential.
I never stopped either, but i buy vinyl…slowed down since my turntable only spins at 33.3 in special occasions when the spirits shine upon it.
Belt driven? May need new belt.
Its a technics DD. I think its a mk 2 or 3 model. When its off its consistently off. Like it still locks into a speed its just the wrong speed.
I think its an electrical issue and im too afraid to take it apart while it still works sometimes. I probably couldnt fix anyway
That could be simple to fix. I bought a used SL-1500 which had the issue that it’d only spin at 33rpm. 45rpm didn’t work. I opened it up and with some tuner spray I washed the switch (spraying it, switching it back and forth). Now as good as new. These things are built like tanks
Oh yeah that’s way out of my wheelhouse too lol. Hopefully someone online has or posts a video on fixing it (or at least a similar table with the same issue)!
That’s super based. Pirate whoever’s stuff you want, but small artists usually depend on that income.
Small artists depend on their income from their 9 to 5 jobs. The music is a bonus
Source - been there
I listen to hundreds of small artists. I can’t buy every singles albums they have.
You don’t have to. Buy the ones you think are worth it, attend shows and maybe buy merch. Like we used to do before leechify
Same issue, I don’t have enough money to support everybody
I have never pirated music more in my life as I do now.
I have never purchased as much music as I do now.
Is t it funny how this seems to be happening in every industry possible? And it’s always reported with sUcH sURpRisE!
Like, we are being abused by capitalists. It feels good to steal. Because they can’t stop taking more and more from us, squeezing us harder and harder.
When you present us with ease of use and a reasonable price point, we are happy with the trade. But they need their returns to keep growing, so they keep squeezing us harder. Their investors demand the line go up. So they squeeze us harder. They need to cut costs, so they squeeze us harder.
It never stops. So we turn to theft. Because they’ve literally left us no choice.
To be fair we’ve never had more choice, and music has almost never been more affordable. We used to buy singles for like $10+. Albums for $20+. Now there are several competing streaming services where we can listen to almost unlimited music each month for less than the cost of one album. Hell, YouTube Premium includes unlimited music steaming for free. Being an independent artist has never been easier, and you can find and pay for any music you like directly with millions of your favourite artists all over the world. The industry used to be entirely controlled by large labels. Honestly, I consider the industry far healthier than it used to be.
I pirate movies and shows because they refuse to create a Spotify-like service. Content is fragmented across a dozen services, they’re infested with ads, content quality keeps declining, the interfaces suck, and prices are outpacing inflation. I pay for Spotify because it’s still a good service for a reasonable price.
on top of that music streaming services dont have exclusives like tv/film so you aren’t forced to get multiple
Soulseek
Or Nicotine+ (a great Soulseek client)
What are the two things?
It’s a direct p2p connection to a single user for downloads. It’s not swarm style like bittorrent. It’s also a great resource for really rare / out of print stuff.
I used it without a vpn for years and never got a single nastygram from my ISP. I think I started with a beta release back around 2000 because I used to be cool like that.
Share your music library, download directly from other users library. Both are compatible, just different clients.